Chapter 35: The Confession Begins
His hand didn’t tighten over hers in reassuring pressure. Instead, it went still, a model of restraint. The clatter of cutlery from the neighboring dorm room seeped through the thin walls. Leah’s curry scent, once comforting, now felt cloying, a thick blanket trying to smother the truth.
“Different how?” she asked, her voice carefully neutral.Bobby exhaled, a long, slow release. He looked past her, at the cheap poster of a mountain vista tacked to the wall.“Quieter. Distant.Like you’re… painting by numbers with me.You say the right things. You do the right things. But it’s like there’s a sheet of glass between us.”
The accuracy was a surgical incision. Leah felt the phantom plug in her ass, a taunting, solid presence. She pulled her hand back, using the motion to reach for her water glass, buying a second.The cool liquid did nothing to soothe the burn in her throat.
“I’m just stressed,” she said, the defense automatic.“Pre-med finals.Wedding planning. It’s a lot.”
“It’s not that,” he said, finally meeting her eyes. His were full of a pained confusion that was worse than anger.“You used to talk to me about stress. Now you just… perform.Even when we fuck, Lee. It’s like you’re following a script.”
A hot spike of shame, sharp and nauseating, shot through her. He’d sensed the performance.Of course he had. She’d been playing the role of his fiancée while her mind was in a dirtier, darker theater. She opened her mouth, another lie ready, but what came out was a brittle, broken sound.
Tears welled, hot and uncontrollable.They were not performative; they were a system failure. She looked down, drops falling onto the uneaten curry, creating tiny craters in the sauce.
“I don’t know how to stop,” she whispered.
The confession, vague as it was, seemed to unlock a door in Bobby. He slid his chair around the small table, the legs screeching on the linoleum, and put an arm around her shoulders. She stiffened, then crumpled into him, her face against his shirt. He smelled of laundry detergent and the faint, familiar sweat of his day.“Stop what?” he murmured into her hair.“Thinking,” she gasped. “Feeling… wrong.Dirty. Like I’m contaminated.” It was the closest she could come to the truth without lighting the fuse.He held her tighter. “Is it… is it still about your ex?What he said?”
It was a life raft, an explanation he could understand. She seized it.“Yes,” she lied, the word muffled against his chest.“And no. It’s like he planted this… this seed.That I’m too much. My body is too much.And now it’s grown into this… thing. This voice that tells me I don’t deserve nice things.That I only deserve…”
...that I only deserve…” The words died, choking on the image of Bronson’s smirk. She couldn’t say it. She pivoted, grabbing the lifeline he’d offered and swinging it like a club. Her tears gave the anger a wet, credible heat.
“I don’t know,” she said, pulling back to look at him, her vision blurred. “I mean my ex made me feel ashamed of my body. That’s why I do Pilates all the time. I don’t want you to think I’m heavy or a cow either.” She saw him flinch at the ugly word. “And I know you apologized and said it was a mistake, but when you slept with Samantha after we got engaged, all these thoughts raced through my head. Is it because she’s skinnier, prettier than me?”
The question hung, jagged and accusing. It was a masterful deflection, weaponizing his own betrayal to camouflage her secret sickness. Bobby’s face crumpled, all his detective certainty erased by a flood of guilt. “No. God, Lee, no. It was never about that. It was stupid, it was me being insecure and fucked up. You have to believe me. You’re beautiful. Your body is… it’s everything.”
He was babbling now, desperate to plug this leak he’d opened. His hands came up to cradle her face, his thumbs wiping clumsily at her tears. “I love every part of you.
“I love every part of you.” The words felt like a blanket thrown over a grenade. Leah’s tears slowed, her breathing hitched. She watched his earnest, pained face, the familiar curve of his lips that now seemed to form only soothing lies. The silent plug inside her felt heavier, a cold counterweight to his warm hands on her cheeks.She didn’t blink.“Then why did you do it? Why did you fuck her?”
The question cut through the room’s stifling warmth. Bobby’s hands dropped from her face as if burned. He looked down at his own palms, his mouth working soundlessly before the words tumbled out in a rush. “She, her…her body is different from yours.I was emotionally vulnerable and she was saying all the right things. I was still a little freaked out when you told me to call you all those names. And Samantha, it was a mistake, but, but…I don’t know.”
He trailed off, a damp silence swallowing his incoherence.Leah stared at him.Different. The word echoed, merging with her ex’s voice: not really attracted to thick girls.A terrible, clarifying calm settled over her. They were all the same.Bobby, her ex, Dr. Grant with his clinical observations—they all saw her body as a type, a problem to be solved or a novelty to be sampled.
“You don’t know,” she repeated, her voice flat.
Before he could formulate another weak defense, she stood up.The movement was abrupt, chair legs screeching. She looked at the half-eaten food, the domestic scene now a pathetic diorama. A hollow ache pulsed in her cunt, a traitorous response to the chaos. She needed to feel something real, even if it was just friction.“Lee?” Bobby’s voice was small.
He didn’t follow her as she walked to the bed and sat on its edge, her back to him.The silence was a third presence in the room, thick and waiting. She heard him shift in his chair, the fabric of his jeans whispering a confession of its own.
“I needed to feel something real,” he said, the words quiet but clear, a blade pushed across the table between them.Leah didn’t turn. She stared at the blank wall, her fingers digging into the cheap comforter. “Do I not make you feel real?” The question was cold, sharp, devoid of its earlier performative tears.A longer pause. She could feel him gathering the words, stacking them like bricks he knew would build a wall. “Leah, I hate myself for saying this,” he began, his voice strained.“But I wish you were a little skinnier. Maybe fifteen pounds.I mean, I know you’re healthy, but sometimes I find you thick. Samantha, she she is…”
Leah turned then.The movement was slow, deliberate. Her face was a calm mask, but her eyes burned. “She’s prettier and skinnier.” Her voice was a flat, dead thing. “Why don’t you go fuck her again.”
She watched the color drain from his face.She watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed. She saw the exact moment his fragile honesty shattered into outright confession. “That’s what I want to talk to you about,” he whispered, his gaze falling to his hands. “I slept with her again last Friday.I’m so sorry. I told her I was done and that I couldn’t do it again. I love you, Leah, I want to marry you.”
The words didn’t land like a blow. They settled into her like a cold, heavy stone, sinking through the layers of her own pretense and finding the bedrock of her self-loathing. A strange, calm clarity descended.He had named the unspoken rule. Her body, her thickness, was a problem to be managed. It was a flaw that drove men to thinner, prettier options. Bronson’s crude appreciation and David’s clinical interest weren’t aberrations; they were the only honest responses to a body like hers.She stood up.She didn’t speak.
She didn’t speak. The silence in the room became a physical thing, a dense fog absorbing the hum of the mini-fridge, the distant laughter from the hallway. Bobby’s confession hung between them, not as a shock, but as a final, sickening confirmation of a truth she had always known. Her body was a compromise. Her love was a management problem.
A cold numbness spread from her core, reaching her fingertips. She looked at his face, at the genuine anguish contorting his features, and felt nothing but a vast, hollow distance. The plug inside her, that secret weight, seemed to pulse, a dark heart beating in time with her own. It whispered of a different truth, one where her thickness was not a flaw but a demand.
“You love me,” she repeated, her voice a dry rustle of paper.
“More than anything,” he pleaded, taking a step toward her, his hand outstretched. “It was a moment of weakness, it meant nothing, I’ll never—”
“Don’t.” The word cut him off. She took a step back, aligning herself with the door. The numbness began to crystallize into something sharper, cleaner. “You told me you wished I was skinnier. Then you fucked a skinny girl. The math is pretty simple, Bobby.”
“It’s not like that! You’re twisting it!” His voice cracked, desperation making it shrill. “I love you. I want to build a life with you.”
“You want to build a life with a thinner version of me,” she corrected, her tone clinical, detached. “A version that doesn’t exist. A version you’ll keep looking for in other women.” She saw the truth of it land in his eyes, saw him flinch. The engagement ring on her finger felt like a cheap piece of costume jewelry, a prop in a play that had just ended.
Her hand went to the doorknob. The metal was cool, real. Bobby saw the movement and lurched forward. “Leah, wait, please, we can fix this, we can go back to Dr. Vernon—”
“Go fuck Samantha,” Leah said, her voice low and perfectly clear. “Go fuck her and think about how much prettier and skinnier she is while you do it. Because that’s what you really want.”
She yanked the door open. The hallway’s fluorescent light sliced into the dim dorm room, framing her in its harsh glow. Bobby stood frozen in the wreckage of their dinner, his mouth agape, a portrait of stunned guilt.
“Leah!”
“Leah!”
His hand closed around her upper arm, not hard, but with a sudden, desperate firmness that spun her back from the threshold. The hallway light cut across his face, highlighting the panic in his eyes. “Just talk to me about this!” he pleaded, his voice cracking under the strain.
She wrenched her arm free, the movement violent. All the clinical detachment evaporated, incinerated by the touch of his hand—the hand that had touched her. The dam holding back every corrosive thought from the last year shattered.
“Do you not find me attractive?” The question wasn’t a whisper; it was a shriek that echoed in the narrow hallway. A door down the hall cracked open, then quickly shut. “Is my ass too big? Are my tits too saggy? Tell me!”
She was vibrating, her hands clawing at her own hips, her own chest, as if to physically tear the offending flesh from her bones. “You want me fifteen pounds thinner? You fuck a skeleton and then come home to this?” She grabbed a handful of her own breast through her t-shirt, squeezing brutally. “You want to build a life with me but you can’t even look at my body without seeing a project? Tell me the truth, you fucking coward!”
Bobby recoiled as if slapped. His mouth opened and closed, a fish on the gasping shore of her rage. “Lee, your body… it’s… I’m attracted to you, I am, it’s just…”
“It’s just what?” She took a step forward, driving him back into the room with the force of her fury. “It’s just that Samantha’s spine doesn’t press into your dick when you’re on top? It’s just that her thighs don’t touch? What is it? Spell it out for me since you’re so fucking honest now!”
“It’s different!” he roared, finally matching her volume, his own frustration boiling over. “Yes, it’s different! She’s tight, okay? Everywhere. And you’re… you’re soft. And sometimes, when we’re doing it, I think about how you’d look if you just… firmed up a little.”
The words hung in the air, more violating than any infidelity. They were a precise, surgical unpacking of every whispered insecurity her parents had planted, every cruel comment from her ex that she’d grafted onto her own soul. Soft. Not thick, not curvy. Soft. A synonym for weak. For unworthy.
A terrible calm smothered the fire in her. Her breathing slowed. She looked at him, really looked at him, and saw a stranger she’d been begging for crumbs of validation from.
“You think about that,” she stated, her voice now hollow and flat. “When you’re inside me.”
He realized his mistake too late. “No, I didn’t mean… God, Leah, I love you. The sex is good, it’s great.”
“It’s a performance,” she corrected him quietly. “And you’re the critic.” She turned again, the fight gone out of her, leaving only a vast, cold emptiness.
She turned again, the fight gone out of her, leaving only a vast, cold emptiness.This time, he didn’t try to stop her. The hallway air felt different, lighter and charged, as she walked away from the open door and his silent, stunned shape framed within it. Her steps were mechanical, a hollow clicking of her soles on the linoleum that echoed in the empty corridor.
She pushed through the heavy fire door into the stairwell, the pneumatic hinge hissing shut behind her, sealing her in concrete silence. Her hand went to her back pocket, but her phone wasn’t there.She’d left it on the bed. The thought brought a flicker of panic, then a wave of relief.Bobby couldn’t text her. She couldn’t check the forum. She was untethered, floating in this sterile shaft of gray paint and exposed pipes.She descended the three flights, her thighs burning with a pleasant, punishing ache. Each step drove the secret plug deeper, a private anchor in the storm of his words.Soft. You’re soft.The memory of his voice was a cold stone in her gut. She hit the ground floor and pushed out into the crisp evening, the air biting her heated cheeks.
Across the quad, her own dormitory building loomed, a grid of lit and dark windows. She walked with her head down, her arms wrapped tight around herself, feeling the rub of her own upper arms against the sides of her breasts.A couple holding hands passed her, laughing at a private joke. Their happiness felt like a chemical spill, toxic and bright in her peripheral vision.Her keycard clicked in the reader. The lobby smelled of microwave popcorn and floor polish. The elevator was too confined, too slow, so she took the stairs again, embracing the burn in her muscles, craving the clean pain of exertion over the septic throb of his confession. She reached her floor, her breath coming in short, sharp gasps now, her cunt slick with a shameful, undeniable wetness.The hall was quiet. Her door looked like every other. She fumbled with the key, her hands shaking, and finally shouldered it open. The room was dark, still smelling faintly of her own lemon laundry detergent.The blue light of her phone pulsed on the rumpled bedspread like a dying star.
She closed the door, the lock engaging with a final, solid thunk. She leaned back against the cool wood, sliding down until she sat on the floor. The vibration started in her diaphragm, a tremble that climbed up into her throat. She pressed the heels of her hands into her eye sockets, seeing bursts of color against the dark.Soft.
Her phone buzzed on the bed, skittering an inch across the cotton. The screen lit up the room for a second, casting a clinical glow on her desk, her Pilates mat rolled neatly in the corner. It buzzed again.And again. A call this time, the ringtone she’d set for him—a cheery, generic pop song—sounded grotesque in the thick silence. It rang until it went to voicemail.A minute later, the buzzing of a text notification.Then another. The blue light pulsed rhythmically, a nagging, digital heartbeat. She didn’t move from the floor.She watched it, detached, as if observing a specimen under glass. Each buzz was a pressure on a bruise she hadn’t known was there. He was trying to explain, to backtrack, to glue the shattered mirror of their future back together with sorrys and promises.
She thought of Samantha.Tight everywhere.A girl built of angles and absence. She imagined Bobby’s lean body folding into hers, a perfect puzzle of bones, no softness to get in the way.Her own hand slipped between her legs, over her jeans, pressing hard against the seam. A sharp, suffocated sound escaped her—a sob or a groan, she didn’t know.
The phone buzzed once more, insistent.Then, blessedly, it stopped. The screen went dark. The room was black again, save for the sliver of security light slicing under the door.In the sudden quiet, the dam broke.
A wail tore from her, raw and guttural, scratching her throat on its way out. She curled forward, forehead against her knees, her body convulsing.The tears were hot and endless, soaking her jeans. She cried for the humiliation, for the precise, surgical cruelty of his “honesty.” She cried for the ghost of the girl she’d been before her first boyfriend, a girl who hadn’t yet learned her body was a problem to be solved.
She cried for the filthy, glorious seconds in Bronson’s van, where she’d been reduced to a thing of pure, wanted flesh, where her softness had been gripped and used without apology. The memory triggered another vicious surge of arousal, wetting her panties, which made her cry harder, disgusted with her own wiring.Her shoulders shook. Snot dripped onto her knees. She was a messy, gasping animal on the floor, all performance stripped away.This was the un-curated, ugly truth of her. Leah Chen, pre-med honors student, fiancée, Pilates enthusiast, was just a heap of weeping, craving flesh on a dirty dorm floor.
Eventually, the violent sobs subsided into ragged hiccups.The tears slowed to a dull leak.She was empty, hollowed out. She unwound herself and stood on unsteady legs, shuffling to the bed in the dark. She didn’t look at the phone.She lay on her side, fully clothed, staring at the wall.
The plug inside her felt like the only real part of her now. A solid, undeniable truth in a body that had been called soft, in a love that had been a lie. It was a crude promise.A dark anchor. The phone, silent and dark on the pillow beside her, was a artifact from a shipwrecked life.She closed her eyes.She did not sleep. She hovered in the numb space between collapse and whatever came next, the weight in her ass a constant, filthy reminder of all the things she was, and all the things she was no longer supposed to want.
She hovered in the numb space between collapse and whatever came next, the weight in her ass a constant, filthy reminder of all the things she was, and all the things she was no longer supposed to want.
Hours passed in the dark, measured by the slow creep of headlights across her ceiling. The numbness began to itch. It was an incomplete void, demanding to be filled with something, anything, more concrete than grief. Her hand snaked out from under the blanket, fingers spidering across the cold sheet until they connected with the sleek glass of her phone. She pulled it to her chest, the device feeling both alien and necessary.
Her thumbprint unlocked it. The screen’s light was a surgical glare in the dark room. Notification icons crowded the top—seven missed calls, a string of texts from Bobby that she deleted without reading. Her finger moved on its own, bypassing her study apps, her calendar, diving into the phone’s hidden folders. She tapped the icon of a generic notepad app, entered a four-digit code, and the forum gateway loaded.
Her heartbeat wasn’t frantic; it was a dull, steady thud of resignation. She navigated to her private messages. The thread with Bronson was still there, their last exchange weeks old. He hadn’t messaged her once. Not a single “u alive?” or “back for more?” The silence from him felt louder than Bobby’s pleading texts. She backed out and clicked on the main board for her thread, ‘WorthItsWeight’. Only a few new messages lurked there.
Most of them were dismissive, idle chatter from the regulars. User ‘Hammer_69’ had posted: She’s just a tease only looking for validation. Probably some fat chick getting off on the attention. ‘DickensCider’ agreed: Yep. She only logs on to get compliments. Classic attention whore behavior. Gone quiet. Bet she found some simp to marry her.
Leah’s breath hitched. The words didn’t wound her; they confirmed a suspicion. Was that all she had been? A voyeur in her own degradation, a tourist too scared to get off the bus? Her eyes scanned for his name, for any sign he’d even noticed her absence. Nothing. Why hadn’t Bronson messaged her? The question was a drill bit in her skull.
Was she boring? Was she a lousy fuck? Had her clumsy attempts at filth been pathetic to a man like him, who probably had women lined up who didn’t need to be taught how to be used? So many self-deprecating comments rushed through her head, a torrent synchronized with the slow, hot pulse between her legs. She’d been forgettable. She was soft, Bobby had said. She was a validation-seeking tease, the forum said. She was nothing.
A terrible, clarifying anger cut through the self-pity. It was hot and sharp. Fuck them. Fuck all of them. Her fingers, suddenly steady, tapped the private message thread with Bronson. The cursor blinked in the empty field. She didn’t think. She let the white-hot humiliation and the weight in her ass and the memory of his hands dictate the text.
LeahChen21: Thought you’d have forgotten the login by now.
She sent it. The swoosh sound was final. She threw the phone onto the pillow beside her as if it had burned her. She stared at the ceiling, the plastic plug feeling suddenly enormous, a testament to a hunger no one else wanted to feed. She waited. Five minutes. Ten. Her cunt was throbbing now, a wet, aching emptiness that contrasted with the solid fullness elsewhere. She imagined his phone lighting up on some greasy workbench. She imagined him glancing at it, seeing her name, and snorting before tossing it aside.
The vibration against the pillowcase was a violent shock. She snatched the phone up.